The Baal HaTurim, and the method he is famous for

What R. Yaakov ben Asher was actually doing at the head of every parsha, and how the same three tools work on a text you can check yourself.

Open almost any printed Chumash and the outer column of the first page of each parsha carries a short block of remazim under the heading Baal HaTurim. A word is weighed against another word of the same value. An unusual spelling is noticed. A phrase is said to occur twice in Scripture, and the other place is named. The comments are brief, and they have been read at the Shabbat table for centuries.

Their author is Rabbi Yaakov ben Asher, born in Cologne around 1269, son of Rabbenu Asher ben Yechiel, the Rosh, and one of the family that carried Ashkenazi learning into Spain when they left the Rhineland. He settled in Toledo and died there around 1343. The title he is known by has nothing to do with the Torah commentary at all. It comes from the Arba’ah Turim, the four-part code of Jewish law he wrote, whose arrangement Rabbi Yosef Karo took as the frame for the Beit Yosef and then for the Shulchan Aruch. Whatever else he was, he was the man who decided the shape of the bookshelf.

He also wrote a full-length commentary on the Torah, mostly plain-sense, and far less widely printed than the short piece that travels beside it. The remazim in the margin of your Chumash are that short companion piece. The order matters. The gematria was never presented as the commentary; it was presented alongside one.

Three tools, not one

The method is usually described as gematria, and gematria is only a third of it.

Gematria weighs a word against another word carrying the same value, and reads the pairing as an allusion. Notarikon treats the letters of a word as the initials of a sentence, or splits one word into two. Masorah is the third and the most underrated: a word or a form is noted to occur exactly so many times in Scripture, and the other occurrences are named. That last tool is not arithmetic at all. It is concordance work, done from memory, centuries before a concordance existed.

It is also the tool this site is, in effect, a machine for. What follows are three comments worked the way he worked them, taken from texts this site actually holds.

One: a word that adds to six hundred and thirteen

Yaakov sends messengers ahead to Esav with a message about where he has been.

Rashi gives the plain reading first: I became neither a prince nor a man of importance, only a sojourner, so there is nothing in our father’s blessing for you to resent. Then he offers the other reading. The word גרתי has the numerical value of 613: though I lived with Lavan the wicked, I kept the six hundred and thirteen commandments, and learned nothing of his ways.

גרתי=613

Notice the structure, because it is the structure of nearly every good comment of this kind. The gematria does not establish the meaning. It gives a second reading to a word whose plain sense has already been settled, and the second reading answers a question the plain sense leaves open, namely why Yaakov chose that particular verb.

Two: the same word, in the only other place it stands

Now the masoretic move, and here our index can do in a moment what the Baal HaTurim did from memory. The form גרתי stands in exactly 2 verses of the twenty-four books. The first is Yaakov’s. This is the other.

Two men, and in each case the word carries the same complaint: I lived among people I did not belong among. That is not a gematria and it does not depend on one. It is what happens when you know where every word is.

Three: the Talmud doing the same thing first

None of this begins with the Baal HaTurim. Berachot 8a records a baraita teaching that nine hundred and three kinds of death were created in the world, learned from the closing words of a verse in Tehillim, since תוצאות comes to that number.

תוצאות=903

And the masoretic half again, unbidden. That spelling also stands in exactly 2 verses of Scripture, and the other one is this.

The issues of death in one verse and the issues of life in the other, in the same word, in the only two places that spelling stands. Our index found that pair. Whether it means anything is a question for a reader, and it is exactly the kind of question the remazim were written to provoke.

One more, of the plainer sort: Shabbat 145b has Rabbi Yehudah read the fifty-two years in which no man passed through Judea out of the word בהמה in Yirmiyahu’s lament.

בהמה=52

What the method is for

Remez is the second of the four traditional levels of reading, standing after the plain sense, and it does not outrank it. A remez that contradicts the peshat has not overturned it; it has simply gone wrong. The Baal HaTurim knew this better than his modern imitators do, which is why his remazim sit in a narrow column beside the text rather than in place of it, and why he wrote a plain-sense commentary as well.

A last word on what is not on this page. His commentary is not in this site’s library, so not a line of it is quoted here, and no daf, page or chapter of it is cited. Everything above comes from Rashi, from the Talmud Bavli and from the Tanakh, all of which we hold, and every number in it was recomputed by our engine before it was printed. If you want his own words, take a Chumash off the shelf. That is where they have always been.